Where is Bovada located? License number 11549 ties the operation to a company called Hove Media Ltd., filed with the Anjouan Gaming Board in the Union of the Comoros. That’s the paperwork answer. Ask Massachusetts, though, and you get something messier — in October 2024 the state’s Attorney General sent a cease-and-desist letter naming two separate companies, not one, as “collectively known as Bovada.” Same brand, two legal entities on the same government letter. The location depends on which document you’re holding.
Where Is Bovada Located? The Names Behind the Brand
Bovada’s address has changed at least twice since the site launched, and each move tracks a different corporate entity — not just a new mailing label on the same company.
From Kahnawake to Curaçao
Bovada launched in December 2011 under Morris Mohawk Gaming Group, a company headquartered in Kahnawake, a Mohawk territory on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. Kahnawake runs its own gaming commission, and it’s the jurisdiction that had licensed the earlier Bodog operation for years before Bovada existed. That arrangement held until October 2016, when the Kahnawake Gaming Commission revoked licenses covering operators still serving US bettors, and Morris Mohawk Gaming Group wound down its role.
Ownership moved to Harp Media B.V., a company registered at 17 Chuchubiweg in Curaçao — an actual street address, not a jurisdiction-as-shorthand. Curaçao’s eGaming framework at the time worked through master licenses that got sublicensed out to individual operators, and Harp Media held Bovada’s sublicense for roughly the next eight years.
The Anjouan Handoff
Curaçao spent the early 2020s dismantling that master-license system, replacing it with licenses issued directly by the Curaçao Gaming Authority instead of rented out through an umbrella holder. Bovada didn’t make that transition. Instead, the license moved again — this time to Hove Media Ltd., under the Anjouan Gaming Board, a regulator based in the Comoros archipelago off the coast of East Africa. That’s the license number printed at the bottom of Bovada’s own site today: 11549.
Laid out end to end, the three eras look like this:
| Years | Operator on record | License jurisdiction | Why it ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011–2016 | Morris Mohawk Gaming Group | Kahnawake, Quebec | Kahnawake revoked licenses for operators serving US bettors (Oct 2016) |
| 2016–2024 | Harp Media B.V. | Curaçao (17 Chuchubiweg) | Curaçao phased out the master-sublicense model |
| 2024–present | Hove Media Ltd. | Anjouan, Comoros (license 11549) | Current arrangement |
Three operators, three regulators, one continuous betting product. The odds, the account balances, and even a chunk of the staff carried across each handoff — only the entity cashing the check changed.
Why the Name Keeps Changing
None of this is a cover-up. Offshore sportsbooks route through whichever jurisdiction currently offers a workable license for serving US bettors without triggering enforcement in the operator’s home country — and that list of workable jurisdictions shifts as regulators tighten or loosen their own rules. Kahnawake tightened in 2016. Curaçao restructured in the 2020s. Each time the ground moved, Bovada’s operator changed paperwork rather than changing the product bettors actually use.
That’s standard practice across this niche, not a Bovada-specific red flag — but it does mean the entity cashing a $500 crypto withdrawal today isn’t the same legal company that opened the account under Morris Mohawk Gaming Group in 2011.
It also explains why “where is Bovada located” doesn’t have a single stable answer the way it would for a company licensed in a US state. A New Jersey sportsbook can’t just refile in a friendlier state overnight — its license is tied to a physical casino partner and a state regulator that would have to approve any change. Offshore operators don’t carry that anchor. When Kahnawake got strict, the operator moved. When Curaçao restructured, the operator moved again. The betting product is the constant; the corporate address is the variable.
Is Bovada’s Costa Rica Address Even Real?
Search “where is Bovada located” and most results say Costa Rica, often paired with specific claims about customer support agents working there, or even a named office building. None of it traces back to anything Bovada itself has filed or published. The Anjouan Gaming Board license names Hove Media Ltd. The Massachusetts cease-and-desist names Harp Media B.V. and Hove Media. Neither document mentions Costa Rica once. It’s plausible some support or technical staff work out of Central America — plenty of offshore sportsbooks route customer service through the region, since it’s a common outsourcing hub for the industry — but as a headquarters claim, “Costa Rica” reads like something one review site wrote years ago that every roundup afterward copied without checking against a license filing.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A licensing jurisdiction is a legal fact you can verify against a regulator’s own site — the Anjouan Gaming Board publishes its licensee list, and Hove Media is on it under 11549. A headquarters claim repeated across a dozen affiliate sites with no named source isn’t verifiable at all. Treat the two differently: one tells you which regulator theoretically has jurisdiction over Bovada, the other tells you nothing you could act on.
What Massachusetts Found When It Went Looking
The Cease-and-Desist Letter
On October 3, 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office issued a cease-and-desist letter accusing Harp Media B.V. and Hove Media — treated in the letter as one operation doing business as Bovada — of offering sports wagering and casino games to Massachusetts residents without a license from the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. The letter demanded Bovada stop serving Massachusetts accounts immediately, refund existing balances in US dollars, and warned of civil penalties up to $5,000 per violation under the state’s consumer protection law. Bovada’s response was to add Massachusetts to its own restricted-states list rather than contest the order — a pattern worth knowing before betting from a state with its own murky legal footing.
The Kentucky Class Action
That wasn’t the first time the ownership chain got pulled into court. In August 2023, a Kentucky plaintiff filed a federal class action — Woods v. Morris Mohawk Gaming Group et al., Case No. 3:23-cv-00053, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky — naming Morris Mohawk Gaming Group, founder Alwyn Morris, Calvin Ayre, and Harp Media BV together as defendants, arguing they operated the same gambling business across the ownership changes. Whatever a court eventually decides about that argument, the fact that a single lawsuit named entities from three different points in Bovada’s corporate timeline says something about how blurry the line between them really is.
Does Any of This Change Whether Bovada Pays?
Not much, in practice. No offshore license — Kahnawake, Curaçao, or Anjouan — comes with a US regulator who’ll force a refund if a withdrawal goes wrong; that gap is the actual tradeoff of using an unlicensed-by-US-standards sportsbook, and it exists no matter which company’s name sits on this month’s certificate. What has stayed consistent through three licensing jurisdictions and two corporate names is the payout mechanics themselves — the withdrawal limits and timelines by method haven’t shifted with the paperwork, and a full check-by-courier payout tracked day by day still runs the same 10-15 business days it did under the old Curaçao license.
Where is Bovada located? Officially, Anjouan, Comoros, under Hove Media Ltd. — but that answer is barely two years old, the one before it lasted eight, and the one before that ended when a different country’s gaming commission pulled the plug. The location is a moving target. The brand’s operating history is the part that’s actually held steady.